Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877): An Analysis

 Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

It’s been some time since I did a close reading of a nineteenth-century poem on my blog, so today I thought I’d write about “Pied Beauty,” a short and, I think, wonderful poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which was written in 1877.

The Argument of the Poem: Hopkins calls on the reader to praise God, who he says created many things in nature that are awe-inspiring for their irregularity, variety, and changeability. These include natural wonders (the sky, which changes color, and chestnuts, which reveal their insides like coals in a fire when they fall and break), animals (cows, trout, finches), and instances of humankind’s impact on the world around us (agriculture, sectioning off the landscape into fields, and other trades, which interact with nature). He closes the poem by contrasting these “dappled things” with God, whose beauty is unchanging and permanent. 

Similarity and Difference: Hopkins uses various literary techniques to meditate on his themes of similarity vs. variety. He employs alliteration (the use of the same starting letter) and internal rhyme, to create a series of pairs throughout the poem (couple-colour; fresh-firecoal; plotted and pierced; fickle, freckled; fathers-forth), giving us a sense of the intelligent design he sees behind the randomness of nature. And he also uses the same technique to pair words with opposite meanings (swift, slow; sweet, sour), which helps downplay their difference and attributes them all to the same higher power. The rhyme scheme of the poem’s lines also plays into this, encouraging us to link the cow to the plough, things to wings, strange to change, and so on. 

Rhetoric: Hopkins was a lover of rhythm, who invented his own schematic for marking emphasis in poetry. And we can see that this is a poem that almost demands to be read aloud. In addition to the repetitions, alliterations, and rhymes mentioned above, the poem starts with a familiar invocation to prayer ("Glory be to God") and ends with one too ("Praise him"). There is also a rhetorical question ("who knows how?") in the middle, which suggests however much we meditate on nature and glorify God, his actions will still remain mysterious. 

Pairing the High with the Low: One thing I love about this poem is how it soars to lofty heights, but then pulls us back to earth, giving us the impression of a poet who is humble and a God for whom all things and creatures matter—great and small. Hopkins compares multicolored sunsets to the hide of a cow. He rhymes his final word, "him," which references God, with the usually not so flattering word “dim.” And he pairs a word that’s strongly associated with beauty, “rose,” with the decided less elegant “moles” to show how he finds beauty in all things. In short, again and again, he delivers on the promise made by the title of the poem—this is about “Pied Beauty,” which doesn’t have to be a contradiction.

What Victorian poem would you like to read me write about next? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. In the mood for more poetry? Check out my blog posts on Tennyson (“The Lady of Shallot,” “Ulysses,” “The Kraken,” “To Virgil,” and “The Epic”), Swinburne, Longfellow, Barrett Browning, and Mew.

New Year, New Reading Resolutions for 2016

Everyone who reads this blog—die-hard Victorianists, academics, students, writers, and casual readers—is united by a love of reading. So, in these early weeks of 2016 I thought I’d share some possible Reading Resolutions for the year—suggestions of ways to improve, diversify and mix up your reading habits.

The Reader, Harold Knight (c.1910)

Make time to read: Many of us lead busy lives, but there’s no such thing as ‘too busy to read’. If you’re looking to increase the quantity of books you tuck into in 2016 then set aside reading periods, whether that’s substituting a good book for playing Candy Crush on your commute, reading in the bath or having a wind down period before going to sleep each night. More books, a more consistent routine and less screentime has got to be good.

Gamify your reading: Do you do well with lists, numbers and targets? Then set yourself a realistic number of books to read each month in 2016. Reward yourself for meeting your goals with a big tick, a gold star or by buying another book. Warning: you may find yourself ‘cheating’ and choosing shorter reads, but never fear, I have a list of brief Victorian works for you to tuck into!

Experiment with different formats: Inspired to read War and Peace by the BBC’s new drama but worried about the backache? Desperate to read when you have dinner to prepare for the family? Mixing up formats could allow you to fit more reading time into your day and help you to avoid fatigue. There are so many amazing audio books available and lots of the older works I blog about are available for free on LibriVox. And more and more of us have e-readers and tablets so we can read novels in electronic form. Don’t be afraid to try something new.

Girl Reading, Alfred Emile Leopold Stevens (1856)

Be part of a community: It’s inspiring to find others who love the same books you do, as I’ve found since joining Twitter and being part of a network of Victorianists there. Read with a friend, join a book group, get on Goodreads, and follow more blogs. Reading doesn’t have to be solitary.

Diversify: Maybe you typically read books published in the last 10 years, maybe everything you read was originally published in English, maybe your bookshelf is stacked with volumes penned by white men. Challenge yourself to go outside your comfort zone this year. Even if you have a niche interest area, there are ways to extend what you’re reading. I’m a Victorianist, but in the past year I’ve blogged about ten 21^st-century novels as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series and written about many 19^th-century writers from countries other than England. Push the limits and see what exciting new voices you can uncover.

Cheat on your genre: Go even further. Reject your usual preferences entirely. Maybe you’re an academic stuck in one century. Maybe you’ve always maintained that graphic novels aren’t ‘real’ books without ever reading any. Maybe you have a tendency to look down on books that are popular, are allergic to romance or are horrified at the thought of horror. Wouldn’t it be fun for once to mix things up and give something very different a go (especially if the experiment saves you from the hassle of regifting!)?

Reread: Give yourself the time to go back and reread a book that meant something to you—a childhood favourite, a novel someone you once knew loved, that set text in school your teacher made you hate. Give a book a second chance or read it with an older pair of eyes. You might be surprised at what you find.

If you have any other Reading Resolutions for 2016 I’d love to hear about them. Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Teaching Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

These are the first lines of a poem that many of us met for the first time in our schooldays – Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (pub. 1833, rev. 1842).

I’ve already blogged about the importance of choosing poems with a strong narrative when introducing children to poetry, so it’s little wonder that this tale of enchantment, love at first sight, and death, remains an English class favourite.

In today’s post I’ll suggest a few creative ways to get a class excited about the poem and engaged with Victorian poetry from what may well be their first encounter with the period.

'I am half-sick of shadows - said the Lady of Shalott', John William Waterhouse (1915) 

1. Retell the story in prose: Most students will be more familiar with prose at this early point in their literary education than poetry. That means there’s more to helping them understand a poem than glossing any unfamiliar words. Asking them to retell the story as a prose narrative will increase their familiarity with the poem and also provides a great opportunity to discuss as a group those questions that Tennyson leaves unanswered.

She has heard a whisper say,

A curse is on her if she stay

What is this curse? Is it real or the result of the Lady’s unhappiness and isolation?

For ere she reach'd upon the tide

The first house by the water-side,

Singing in her song she died,

The Lady of Shalott.

What causes the Lady’s death? Can you think of any other examples of literary texts where singing and death are linked?

'The Lady of Shalott', Arthur Hughes (1873)

2. Write a Tennysonian stanza: ‘The Lady of Shalott’ has a distinctive rhyme scheme (AAAABCCCB). Ask students to compose a stanza of their own following this pattern – either on the subject matter of the story or on a topic of their choice.

Engaging with the poem’s structure in this creative way will be a much more memorable experience than simply learning to letter the lines. And, what’s more, it’ll help students start to think about rhymes in the poem that are less than perfect.

Does ‘barley’ really rhyme with ‘clearly’? Or ‘balcony’ with ‘by’?

'The Lady of Shalott', John William Waterhouse (1888)

3. Draw a mini-scene: Tennyson’s poem is awash with visual details, and every stanza tells a mini-story in itself. Give each student a stanza to illustrate. Examples could include:

The isle where the Lady lives where ‘Four gray walls, and four gray towers/Overlook a space of flowers’;

The reaper who thinks he hears a ‘fairy’, while working at the end of the day;

The Lady, alone in her tower (‘A pearl garland winds her head:/ She leaneth on a velvet bed,/ Full royally apparelled’);

The villagers watched by the Lady (‘surly village churls,/ And the red cloaks of market girls');

The appearance of Lancelot (‘All in the blue unclouded weather/ Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather,/ The helmet and the helmet-feather/ Burn'd like one burning flame together’).

'The Lady of Shalott looking at Lancelot', John William Waterhouse (1893)

4. Create a soundtrack: ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is divided into four Parts, each with a distinct mood and subject matter. Have your students imagine they were making the poem into a movie.

What songs/pieces of music would best accompany each section of the poem? Why? What if the movie was set in the twenty-first century?

'The Lady of Shalott', John Atkinson Grimshaw (1878)

If you teach ‘The Lady of Shalott’, I’d love to hear about how you inspire your class! Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

English Literature Study Skills: What is Realism?

Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate

At some point, probably quite early, in your degree in English Literature, you’ll be asked to write an essay on realism. You might already have a pretty good idea what that’s likely to mean (chunky novels, lots of characters, attention to the ‘ordinary’), but, being a good student, your first port of call is likely to be a dictionary (read Google or Wikipedia) where you are likely to learn that realism is ‘the attempt to depict subjects truthfully’ and literary realism a ‘literary movement stressing the depiction of life and society as it exists or existed’.

So far – so straightforward. What could be simpler than art holding a mirror up to life? So influenced are we by the success of the nineteenth-century realist novel that its conceit not only seems obvious, but uncontroversial. And so, to get to the heart of realism in the period, as a literary critic, rather than a lexicographer, it is best to look to discussions of the movement in the novels themselves and to the figurehead of English literary realism – George Eliot.

 Your lecturers will often point you to the following paragraph:

 Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.

At this point in Middlemarch (1871-2), Eliot’s ‘parable’ plays a dual role – the candle at once stands for the egotism of the individual (particularly here Rosamond Vincy) and the act of writing a realist work of fiction. The novelist illuminates how the world actually is (holding up the candle), but at the same time brings an apparent order and organisation to events (the scratches) which in fact must extend beyond the confines of a single story, if they are indeed realistic. The novel – champion of the realist form – is a flattering illusion, which cannot help but elevate the writer (all-knowing, all-present and most importantly an organisational force), even as it claims to prioritise the everyday and the unexceptional.

Starting here, though, as many discussions of realism do, can be difficult. For any students tackling Eliot and co for the first time, my advice would be to hold off on Middlemarch and turn first to Chapter XVII of the earlier Adam Bede (1859), unpromisingly titled ‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’. Here, rather than delving straight into a central ‘problem’ or ‘conflict’ within realism, Eliot gives an eloquent defence of its importance.

 "This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!" I hear one of my readers exclaim.

 "How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice! You might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things—quite as good as reading a sermon."

Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.

Here, Eliot imagines readers’ responses to Adolphus Irwine, a flawed but kind clergyman, and uses this as an opportunity to praise the real, over the ideal. The same egotism suggested by the parable of the candle is present here – Eliot cannot keep herself, her mind and her act of creation, out of the discussion, as it is central. And she admits that this will warp what appears (‘the mirror is doubtless defective’). Yet, interestingly, the language of faith and witness which she goes on to replace the reflective imagery with, turns this very interference into an additional virtue. And one, she goes on to tell us, which is difficult to achieve:

 So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is NOT the exact truth.

What Eliot is getting at here, isn’t just the impressiveness of her own achievement. She’s showing how realism must tap into a deeper layer of truth. Simple reportage of events and people isn’t enough, when people struggle constantly to voice the ‘exact truth’. Is realism achievable? Could the levels of empathy required to understand life and society be dangerous? Latimer, the protagonist in her short horror story The Lifted Veil, published the same year as Adam Bede, is tortured by his ability to understand the minds of his fellow men and, in Middlemarch, Eliot would go on to write:

 If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

For students sitting down to their first essay on realism, maybe here is a more inspiring place to start – not with realism as some ‘obvious’ movement, but as a philosophy for approaching how you live, how you think and how you write, which throws into relief the difficulties of relating to other people.

 Students, what topics would you like the Secret Victorianist to write on? Let me know here, on Facebook or, as ever, by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Why Studying English will Ruin Your Life...

You may have heard that being a literature grad is a sure fire way to win worldly success - just consider the resulting parental pride, transferable employment skills, and high esteem of Tory politicians. But sadly, you were wrong – take it from the Secret Victorianist. Studying English will in fact destroy your life one area at a time…

1. Greetings Cards: The sentimental poem in the birthday card from your nan, a token of affection from a friend overseas - every missive designed to bring a tear to the eye and warmth to your heart is officially ruined for you. Some say it’s the thought which counts, but the lack of scansion and the clichéd sentiments will make you want to run a mile.

2. Shop signs: Which English grad doesn’t know the horror of the misplaced apostrophe? This obsession may be becoming a problem…

3. Your own writing: Remember as a child how you used to ‘make books’ and write stories? Not anymore! You can’t write a line without suffering extreme anxiety, serious writer’s block, and an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. 

4. Alcohol: Three years at uni and suddenly you find that far too many of your heroes were depressive alcoholics with dysfunctional relationships. Still feeling hopeful about how that ‘quiet drink’ tonight is going to go? I thought not. 

5. Love: A mutually destructive but passionate love affair with a fellow writer may have its downsides as well as perks, but the truth is most lovers just won’t be able to measure up to historical examples or fictional flings. My advice? Head to bed with a book – here’s some brief suggestions if you’re after a quick rebound!

How has studying English destroyed YOUR life? Let me know – here, on Facebook or, as always, by tweeting @SVictorianist!

English Literature Study Skills: Using Criticism

In my previous post I looked at strategies for reading when it comes to approaching a new novel for study, discussing note taking, note reading, pace of progression, reference to additional resources and using introductions as afterwords. In this post I look at the next steps for studying a text – looking at what happens when you start dipping your toe into the scary world of criticism and identifying the best places to start:

Introductions: Here’s where I left off last time. Reading the intro before finishing the text leads to boredom, bias and spoilers, but reading it straight after finishing can be incredibly helpful. A well-written introduction references the key critical ideas when it comes to a text and can point you to some good pieces of criticism from which to start. But beware. That bargain fifth-hand copy you bought on Ebay may not be up to date when it comes to critical reception. And your teachers, tutors or lecturers are going to want to see analysis from you which goes beyond that provided in the most commonly read copy.

Companions: The Cambridge Companions can be a great place to start when it comes to approaching a new author, genre or period. Each Companion is comprised of essays by prominent scholars in the field, covering a range of important issues affecting the topic. e.g. the Companion to George Eliot has essays dealing with her life, politics in her novels, and the representation of gender in her work (among others). What’s great about the Companions is that they serve as a general introduction when read cover to cover without being dumbed down because of the calibre in contributors. Alternatively, they are useful as reference books. The chapter on gender will cite multiple other critics who have dealt with this topic, meaning it can act as a handy guide to their arguments, if this is an area you are also looking at.

Contemporary reviews: You can find collections of these for major authors and you can also usually find them online. They are important for understanding context and can act as good starting points for your own essays – especially if you use one which is less well known.

Journals: Students are often under time pressures and all too often you are quite far into a critical work before you realise it’s not going to be helpful to you - journal articles help solve this problem as they are quicker to read and often state in the first paragraph what their argument will be. Some authors even have whole journals dedicated to them (e.g. The Wellsian on H.G. Wells) which means you can use their catalogues as an index for identifying critics and arguments you want to pursue.

Do you have any other tips when it comes to starting your critical reading? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

English Literature Study Skills: Approaching new novels

Approaching a new text for study can be intimidating, especially if this is the first time you’ve studied literature seriously, know that knowledge and understanding of this novel is crucial for success in an important exam, or are taking your studies to a new level, e.g. transitioning from GCSE to A Level or starting degree level study.

Different people find different techniques suit them when it comes to academic work, but below are a few suggestions on how to improve your approach to literary study which you might find helpful.

1. Reading for flow: At secondary school we spent months ploughing through set texts at a snail’s pace, doing exercises on each chapter and losing all sight of novels as a mode of entertainment which is meant to be enjoyable.

My top tip is to read a new novel cover to cover before attempting any ‘analysis’. That way you’ll be reading a text in the way it was designed to read, duplicating the reading experience of the many others who have read the novel previously and be in a better position to assess the effects the writing has on you. You’ll find out which portions of a novel are faster paced and make you want to keep reading and be able to appreciate chapter and section breaks – whether they give you time to pause or make you want to read on.

If you are reading a novel in a classroom setting, taking the time to read ahead outside class is definitely not time wasted. You’ll gain more from any discussion as a group if you already have a handle on plot and some idea where the novel is going thematically.

2. Notes  - theirs and yours: One thing which can be detrimental to appreciating the flow of a text is notes – note reading and note taking.

Many editions of Victorian novels, for instance Oxford World Classics and Penguin Classics, – are equipped with really helpful and informative endnotes, but taking up the time to flick back and read each one can lead to your reading experience being disjointed, as the notes interrupt you, sometimes mid-sentence. My rule of thumb is to avoid the temptation to read every note just to feel studious, especially if you already understand a reference in the text. Turn to the notes when your understanding is impaired. For example, there may be quotes in another language or a reference to a famous person, place or historical person unknown to you.

The type of notes I always avoid at first reading are the ones which deal with textual changes and omissions. These are often lengthy, reading them can confuse as you are trying to get to know this version of the text first and editors very often presume knowledge of the plot meaning these notes are accompanied by explanations which include spoilers. Textual variation is a rich field for study later but I’d say leave them for now and come back to them once you’re better acquainted with the text.

Taking your own notes can also be unhelpful in some cases. Use them only to aid your own reading experience – e.g. to keep track of characters and their relationships to each other if they are proving confusing (think Wuthering Heights) – or as a helpful list of references to chase up later. So, if you read a line or passage which makes you think of another novel, seems particularly interesting to you or you know you’ll want to come back to later, take a note of the page number with a brief one or two word reminder to yourself about why you want to bookmark it. This is particularly useful if you are at a more advanced stage of study, where you know you are looking at this text to explore a certain topic or theme.

Don’t feel that if you’re not taking notes, you’re not studying. You are. Writing ‘pathetic fallacy’ or ‘jealousy’ etc. in the margins won’t help you at all and there’s no point writing notes you’ll never read again.

3. Other resources: If you are still reading the text there’s no point turning to literary criticism yet, or even to study guides – these will come in later. But there are other resources which might help. If your understanding is impaired, don’t just soldier on. Turn to search engines (or good old dictionaries) to look up unfamiliar words. And if an historical event or person is referenced in the text without a note, take the time to at least read the first line of Wikipedia.

4. Introductions: Never read the introduction first. The blurb will give you enough of an idea about what sort of novel it is that you’re starting, while an introduction will a) spoil the plot for you, b) confuse by referencing things you don’t know about yet and c) prejudice the way you read the text. If a friend talked at length about a film you hadn’t seen, the conversation wouldn’t be much fun and might even put you off going to the cinema to see it. By the time you read the introduction you should be in a position where your responses can be more conversational  and critical – ‘I thought that too!’, ‘I hadn’t thought about it that way’, ‘I’m not sure I agree with the editor on this’. Introductions can be very helpful, especially for directing you towards criticism, but avoid the temptation to start at page ‘i’ and turn straight to page ‘1’.

In a follow up post, I’m going to be looking at what to do once you have finished reading your text (including more detail on how introductions can be helpful). In the meantime, if you have any questions or tips on approaching novels for study, then let me know – in the comments below, on Twitter (@SVictorianist), or on my Facebook page.